Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited | PopMatters Highway 61 Revisited The year was 1965. America’s involvement in Vietnam is escalating and American troops are sent to the Dominican Republic in an attempt quell a rebellion on the island. The Johnson Administration announces an anti-poverty initiative as part of his Great Society. Selma, Alabama is racked with violence as segregationists attack peaceful civil rights marchers and riots break out in Watts, causing 34 deaths and injuries to 1,000 people. Against this backdrop, Bob Dylan makes what will prove to be a prophetic musical statement, plugging in, turning up the volume and altering the pop music landscape for years to come. First came Bringing It All Back Home, with one side of electric music and one side of what can best be described as acoustic rock, followed in short order by the single “Like a Rolling Stone”, bursting onto the charts like that first gunshot that started the Revolutionary War, and his controversial electric performance Newport Folk Festival and the single. And yet, all of that was just prelude. On August 30, Dylan released what remains for me the most electrifying rock-and-roll album of all time, Highway 61 Revisited.

From its opening rim shot, which snaps the album into motion, an opening that stands above nearly all others in the history of rock and roll, a crack that strikes deep into the soul, Dylan spins and whirls into a snarling, searing 51 minutes of anarchic imagery and music. This is Bob Dylan at the height of his phantasmagoric powers, the dark visionary, the painter of nightmarish inner landscapes who brings together the strands of disparate worlds, mixes them and deconstructs them, crafting a world of disillusion and alienation that offers what may have been the first inclination that the Age of Aquarius was not all peace and love. This is an album of brutality and innocence, an album that could only have been produced by an artist at the height of his powers, with a war raging overseas in the shadow of a presidential assassination. It is that rare album on which not only are there no weak cuts, but on which each song is a masterpiece, a classic rock and roll album. Some history is in order, here. This is Dylan’s second electric effort, released in August of 1965, just five months after the remarkable Bringing It All Back Home.

The earlier effort featured an electric side and an acoustic side, though the acoustic songs are nothing like anything he’d recorded in the past. In structure, in approach, they are songs that seem designed for full-band backing. Dylan had been making the move toward rock and roll for about a year, starting with the release of the more personal Another Side of Bob Dylan, an album that lacked much of the topical fireworks of his two previous albums. Another Side was still a folk album, but sounded different than the folk music that was popular at the time both in terms of content and song structure. Then in February 1965, Dylan released “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, the rollicking, rocking masterpiece that would forever change how rock and roll would be played from then on. “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, with its images of revolution and chaos, prefigured the pitched political battles that were to soon characterize the decade—but its musical impact was not apparent until the release in July of “Like a Rolling Stone” and Dylan’s fateful appearance at the Newport Folk Festival several days later.

The 1965 festival has taken on mythic stature in the annals of rock and roll and there is some dispute over exactly what happened when Dylan walked on stage dressed in leather jacket and white shirt with snap-tab collar and cranked out his allegory of intellectual freedom, “Maggie’s Farm”, “It Takes A Lot to Laugh” and “Like A Rolling Stone”. There apparently was booing and the crowd was angry—though just how angry and how much booing remains in dispute. He left the stage and came back to play a pair of acoustic songs—“It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”—and left again. He then went into the studio to record what was to become Highway 61 Revisited—and it seems clear from the finished product, at least, that Dylan was affected by what went down at Newport. Much of the album was recorded and finished in the wake of Newport and some of the disc seems in some ways a rebuke to those who had created an image of Dylan that Dylan had no interest in living up to.

(The brutal “Positively Fourth Street” was recorded during these sessions, though not included on the album.) Dylan had already made his statement of liberation on Bringing It All Back Home, when he sang “Well, I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them. / They sing while you slave and I just get bored. / I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” The result is Dylan’s hardest rocking album, an album of biting satire and vituperation, of fevered playing and controlled aggression. There are the brutal recriminations of “Like a Rolling Stone”, a song so pointedly nasty, so harsh and unforgiving, that it is almost scary. “How does it feel / How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone?” Dylan sings, running down the song’s target, a woman who “dressed so fine” and attended “the finest schools” only to find herself finally taken down a peg, lost and alone.

“Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people / They’re drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made / Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things / But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe,” Dylan sings without sympathy. “You used to be so amused / At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used / Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse / When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose / You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.” “Tombstone Blues” is a dervish of images and surging, gyrating music—a truly anarchic explosion of music. The key here is the mix—somehow producer Bob Johnston allows each of the players their own space, allows us to hear each instrument as it weaves its musical line in and around the others, with Michael Bloomfield’s biting guitar and Al Kooper’s rambling piano charging up the entire effort.

“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” is Dylan’s easy blues, a hobo song that ambles along its way, the languid beat masking the urgency—hinted at throughout by Dylan’s keening harmonica—an urgency that suddenly spills out in the final verse: “Don’t say I never warned you / When your train gets lost.” That hidden urgency explodes in Al Kooper’s bouncing organ on “From a Buick 6”, as the singer navigates the cruelties of the world, with a little help from his “soulful mama”. “Ballad of a Thin Man” reprises the theme of dislocation that Dylan raised in “Like a Rolling Stone”, telling the story of a man, Mr. Jones, lost in the modern world, Mr. Jones wandering lost in the wilderness: “Because something is happening here” but he doesn’t “know what it is”. But it also is Dylan’s response to the changing times, a coda to “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in which he derides the comfortable and the would-be opinion makers and trendsetters (He is “well read” and has “many contacts”).

There is the chuckle at the end of the first verse that lets you know Dylan has no sympathy for Mr. Jones, the song tracing with a growing derision Mr. Jones’s pretensions and growing alienation—“There ought to be a law / Against you comin’ around.” With “Queen Jane Approximately”, Dylan leaves the door open, saying that there might be some relief from the alienation and dislocation—“Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?” Then comes the title cut, which kicks off what I’ve always thought of as a three-song nightmare suite: “Highway 61 Revisited”, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, and the majestic “Desolation Row”. The songs pile up a series of incongruous images, from the demanding god of Highway 61, where the good, the bad, and the horrid are all quite at home, to the story of Tom Thumb kicking around Juarez. It is on “Desolation Row” that Dylan brings this nightmare to its logical and illogical conclusion, with a host of unlikely characters—Cinderella, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Dr.

Filth and Nero—casting about in a world that seems to jump off a Brueghel canvas, or maybe out of a William S. Burroughs novel. “They’re selling postcards of the hanging / They’re painting the passports brown / The beauty parlor is filled with sailors / The circus is in town,” Dylan sings atop a truly beautiful guitar line, a slowed-down flamenco riff that seems at odds with the dislocation and brutality of the lyrics. The lyrics are a thick jumble of images, much of them contradictory, leaving us to wonder whether “Desolation Row” is heaven or hell. The Good Samaritan is heading to the carnival, but Casanova is punished for going there.

Einstein had been famous “For playing the electric violin / On Desolation Row”, while Ophelia, who finds death “quite romantic”, stares at “Noah’s great rainbow” and “She spends her time peeking / Into Desolation Row.” And it’s not as if the singer knows the answer either—or that we are asking the right questions: “All these people that you mention / Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame / I had to rearrange their faces / And give them all another name / Right now I can’t read too good / Don’t send me no more letters no / Not unless you mail them / From Desolation Row.” Highway 61 Revisited does not fit in comfortably with the other trends of its time. It was one of a handful of albums (including the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Revolver) that gave literate rockers the green light to create a kind of intelligent, probing rock music that had not existed before.

But it also was, in many ways, the first punk-rock album—it has the same sense of antagonistic glee that the Sex Pistols brought to their songs—and hinted at the dissolution and discontent that would come only a few years later, with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., with Altamont and the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and others as the ‘60s turned to the ‘70s. Share via Home | The Official Bob Dylan Site Amazon | iTunes | Bob Dylan Store Bob Dylan on Muhammad Ali “If the measure of greatness is to gladden the heart of every human being on the face of the earth, then he truly was the greatest. In every way he was the bravest, the kindest and the most excellent of men.” Hear “All the Way” off ‘Fallen Angels’ “All the Way” is the second song released off the album Fallen Angels out May 20. Both “All the Way” and “Melancholy Mood” are available instantly with all digital pre-orders of the album. The track can also be streamed here and on Apple Music. ‘Fallen Angels’ is Now Available! Order your copy today.

Bob Dylan’s new album, Fallen Angels, is available now for instant download, on CD, or on limited edition vinyl. Visit the Bob Dylan Music Store “The Cutting Edge” Exclusive Premieres See and hear all the exclusive premieres from Bob Dylan’s The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12 Introducing the Bob Dylan Studio A Revisited Micro-site Put yourself in the studio during the 1965-66 sessions by visiting the Studio A Revisited microsite, which gives you an opportunity to play with the four studio “stems” that make up “Like A Rolling Stone” and more. Bob Dylan Wins a 2016 Grammy Award Can You Sing As Well As Bob Dylan? Singing Session on Studio A Revisited has launched and allows fans around the globe to step up to the microphone in an attempt to match Bob Dylan’s unique phrasing and timbre. Bob Dylan – The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12 BOB DYLAN – THE CUTTING EDGE 1965-1966: THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL.

12, A DELUXE 6CD ANTHOLOGY, TO BE RELEASED BY COLUMBIA RECORDS/LEGACY RECORDINGS ON NOVEMBER 6 Latest Volume in Acclaimed Dylan Bootleg Series Premieres Previously Unreleased Studio Recordings–including Never-Before-Heard Songs, Outtakes, Rehearsal Tracks, and Alternate Versions–from the Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde Sessions “The Lyrics: Since 1962” Available Now! Visit the Bob Dylan Store Apparel, posters and more at the Bob Dylan Store . Run your fingers down my spine; Bring me a touch of bliss The Story of “The Cutting Edge” WATCH THE VIDEO Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan | Classic Rock Review Buy Highway 61 Revisited Some albums are borne of the ether. Some are born of the earth. A rare few refine both into a crystallized masterpiece. Out of Bob Dylan‘s entire discography, Highway 61 Revisited stands as the brightest example of his work. It takes concepts he had experimented with previously and solidifies them into liquid gold. The contradiction in words was intentional there because Highway 61 Revisited is nothing if not fluid.

While honoring his past this album also points a big bright burning finger towards works that had yet to come like Blonde On Blonde , Desire and Blood On the Tracks . Highway 61 Revisited is Bob Dylan in a nutshell, a nutshell that is inside out and bleeding right into our collective brains. The album began its climb to creation the day Bob Dylan was born in Minnesota near the actual U.S. Highway 61, which stretched from the Canadian border north of his hometown, south through Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, and all the way to New Orleans. In his mind the highway connected a young Dylan to blues legends like Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley. The blues serve as the foundation for Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan’s own angst at the time of the album’s recording served as the structure. He had recently “gone electric” at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965 and come back from a disappointing tour of England. He was looking to do something different and he had an axe to grind with the people who wanted him to stay in his folk box. When he finally got some musicians together to record this sixth studio album it came together like it was being guided by divine hands.

Produced by Bob Johnston, it only took two brief sessions and 9 days for the album to be completed. Amazing aspects of it, like the organ riff on “Like a Rolling Stone”, were improvised on the spot. Al Kooper, the musician who improvised the riff, just happened to be visiting one day and managed to play his way right into rock and roll history. While Dylan’s lyrics on the album reflect his frustrations at the time, he puts a fantastic twist on them by throwing in elements of surrealism. He evokes dreams by filling his songs with characters from history and fiction. The resulting album is infinitely more complex than anything put together in 9 days has any right to be. Every listen allows the ear to hear something new and the mind to interpret the lyrics differently. Fifty years after its original release it still stands as a perfect example of musical complexity.

Highway 61 Revisted by Bob Dylan Released: August 30, 1965 (Columbia) Produced by: Bob Johnston & Tom Wilson Recorded: Columbia Studio A, New York, June–August 1965 Side One Harvey Brooks – Bass Bobby Gregg – Drums Each song on this album is an enigma that you could write thousands of words about and still be no closer to truly understanding or explaining it, so I’ll leave that to someone else. The album kicks off with Dylan’s first huge hit, “Like a Rolling Stone”, which reached #2 on the US charts. The song is partially autobiographical and probably one of the best opening tracks ever and serendipitously got its signature hook when Kooper, a 21-year protégé of producer Tom Wilson, snuck in on organ and made the best of his opportunity. “Tombstone Blues” speeds up an already electric start. Like the title song, “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Desolation Row” we get Dylan’s use of famous names in his songs to create a parable that feels timeless and utterly surreal. The guitar on “Tombstone Blues” is one of the finest on any Dylan album.

“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It takes a Train to Cry” is a more classical blues ballad and brings in the harmonica for full effect. It’s a rare song that doesn’t overdo the instrument and makes it feel like an organic part of the sauntering rhythm and the piano has an almost ragtime quality. “From a Buick 6” is probably the weakest song on the album since the lyrics aren’t as wild as everything else but the music is still incredible throughout. This could be one of the strongest songs on an album that wasn’t so packed with great songs. “Ballad of a Thin Man” sports scathing lyrics poking fun at everyone that isn’t in on Dylan’s jokes. This album is Dylan exorcising all his anger and frustration at everyone that didn’t get him or wanted him to be their dancing monkey, “Ballad of a Thin Man” is the keystone of the album and those sentiments. “Queen Jane Approximately” is just as scathing as “Mr. Jones” but sounds a lot friendlier due to Dylan’s lighter vocal tone. It doesn’t sound quite as menacing but it’s still talking about someone who isn’t aware of how stupid they really are.

The song is believed to refer to Dylan’s fellow folk singer and ex-girlfriend, Joan Baez, but only he knows if that is truth. It is totally applicable to say this song applies to any of the people involved in the folk movement that Dylan was trying to leave. It’s also one of the most underrated songs on the album. Dylan’s opening line of the title track, “Highway 61 Revisited”, connects the route to history by pairing it with the biblical story of Abraham, while starting with a wailing police siren. “Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues” is a hangover song from the opening lines which discuss being lost in Juarez, Mexico. The song also discusses how the destructive nature of all those things we think we want so much that leave us changed for the worse. “Desolation Row” is the final track and a juggernaut. It’s an 11 minute epic that manages to keep your ear interested because you want to see what’s around the next bend of lyrics. It’s got a great southwestern acoustic guitar that sounds like Dylan is singing the song in a dimly lit tavern somewhere.

If “Like A Rolling Stone” is a perfect opener this is the show stopping finale that bookends the greatest of all Dylan albums. Throughout Highway 61 Revisited the lyrics seem to be totally relatable and completely mysterious at the same time. This is one of the album’s greatest strengths. The lyrics’ meaning can never be fully unraveled, which means they can always mean whatever you think they do. Each time Dylan talks about the album he gives a different explanation for the driving motivations behind the album, the songs and the verses, keeping the mystery of the album alive and open to whatever interpretation your mind desires. Great art is always open to interpretation and that’s one of the big keys to Highway 61 Revisited. Whereas much of Dylan’s previous work was locked in a particular time, this album is completely timeless. Most importantly of all though, the music is just plain great. It’s more complex than anything he had done previously and more rewarding to listen to as a result. It’s a great album but if you want to debate me on that point, just remember to send your emails from Desolation Row. ~ Part of Classic Rock Review’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of 1965 albums.

Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks CD Album Bob Dylan > Blood on the Tracks CD music Product Description Blood on the Tracks album for sale by Bob Dylan was released Jun 01, 2004 on the Columbia label. Includes liner notes by Pete Hamill. Blood on the Tracks CD music contains a single disc with 10 songs. By the mid-'70s, even Dylan's most ardent supporters began taking his artistic decline for granted. Blood on the Tracks album for sale Albums like NEW MORNING and PLANET WAVES were fine works, but lacked the visionary spark of his seminal '60s recordings. Blood on the Tracks CD music At 34 he was already being written off as a has-been. That presumption is what made BLOOD ON THE TRACKS such a glorious sucker-punch of a record. ...

See Full Description Blood on the Tracks buy CD music Product Reviews Rolling Stone (12/11/03, p.96) - Ranked #16 in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums Of All Time" - "...No one disputes the album's luxuriant tangle of guitars, the gritty directness in Dylan's voice and the magnificent confessional force of his writing..." Q (1/03, p.69) - Included in Q Magazine's "100 Greatest Albums Ever" Q (12/93, p.131) - 5 Stars (out of 5) - "...Suddenly Dylan no longer seemed to be straining to recapture the surreal poetic torrents of the '60s....this is probably Dylan's most complete and most unified album--and yes, damnit, his best..." Alternative Press (5/01, p.104) - Included in AP's "10 Essential Breakup Albums" - "...Dylan has never been so thematically clear....representing a man full of regret and misery, singing through his tears." Vibe (12/99, p.157) - Included in Vibe's 10

0 Essential Albums of the 20th Century Q (Magazine) (p.110) - "Against the backdrop of his own collapsing marriage, it's as close as he ever got to the confessional school of singer-songwriters..." NME (Magazine) (10/2/93, p.29) - Ranked #85 in NME's list of the "Greatest Albums Of All Time." NME (Magazine) (9/18/93, p.19) - Ranked #29 in NME's list of the "Greatest Albums Of The '70s." NME (Magazine) (8/12/00, p.28) - Ranked #13 in The NME "Top 30 Heartbreak Albums" - "...A bitter, sorrowful eulogy to love and the pain of breaking up." Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks Album Track Listing Trk cdu4asppid music 6738818 cdu4pidall cdu4pls7 ver260cdu cdu4all 1/19/2017 11:46:0

9 PM � PreRip Terms and Conditions PreRip is a free option on select CD's displaying the PreRip icon.

This option allows you to download the MP3 version of that CD immediately after your purchase. The physical CD will still be shipped to you. If you agree to accept your PreRip MP3s, please be aware that the corresponding CD will be non-refundable and cannot be canceled from your order. This protects us against customers taking the free MP3 and then canceling the CD. PreRip availability may change at any time, so we recommend that you download as soon as possible. Should the CD you receive be defective, we will exchange it for a new one. PreRip is only available to customers in the United States. This is a limitation placed on us by the record labels. Highway 61 Revisited: Amazon.co.uk: Music Highway 61 Revisited 11:21 Album Only Sold by Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.. By placing your order, you agree to our Terms of Use . Product Description Review There’s been so much written and said about each and every one of Bob Dylan’s albums that it’s all too easy to wind-up lost in the vast, labyrinthine myths surrounding them.

One of the biggest is the whole shock-of-the-new deal, otherwise known as the day the earth stood still when Dylan picked up a Stratocaster. It seems ludicrous now that there could be so much ballyhoo over his decision to play some tunes with a rock group, especially when, even by the standards of the day, it was fairly innocuous rock music at that. Still, escaping fundamentalists from whatever cult they belong to is no bad thing, and it was a newly-liberated Dylan, just days after his controversial appearance at Newport, who recorded Highway 61 Revisited with a rock band in tow. This is the point where Dylan planted both feet firmly on the ground that had been partially turned on 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, and started digging in. It’s easy to overlook the testy brilliance of “Like A Rolling Stone “on account of its having been part of the musical furniture for the last forty years. Yet the fresh air and fresh ideas, whistling alongside Al Kooper’s soaring organ lines, all add up to this being a 100% classic with one of the great cutting vocal performances to date.

Though comparatively muted at an instrumental level, the “Ballad Of A Thin Man” is no less mordant and biting a put-down. Not all imagery tucked up inside those increasingly florid lyrics plays well but there’s no mistaking the attitude jumping out of every last syllable. The abrasive scrape of his voice meets its match on the boisterous shuffle of “Tombstone Blues” with a spectacular guitar break from Mike Bloomfield ahead of the penultimate verse. To these ears at least, Dylan works best when he’s at his most concise. Though the purists may find sanctuary in the acoustic-only eleven minute-long “Desolation Row”, and regard any dissention as sacrilege, such verbosity drags slightly upon an invigorating collection of songs which takes things at a brisk pace. --Sid Smith 'The Dylan 6' - Bob Dylan's best albums | TimePieces.nl - Greatest Albums of All Time 'The Dylan 6' - Bob Dylan's best albums 'Blood on the Tracks' beats 'Blonde on Blonde' to the number one position, 'Highway 61 Revisited' comes third.' -We present you 'The Dylan 6', Bob Dylan's best albums.

An overall Bob Dylan greatest albums chart based on the number of times a Dylan album appears in the now 135 all time greatest albums of all time charts in our database. Please scroll further down for 'The US Dylan 6', 'The UK Dylan 6', 'The Dutch Dylan 4', 'The Belgian Dylan 2' and (nice to know) 'The Dylan 6 twenty-one years ago'. Number ONE - Blood on the Tracks - in 64 charts Blood on the Tracks is Bob Dylan's 15th studio album, released by Columbia Records in January 1975. The album marked Dylan's return to Columbia after a two-album stint with Asylum Records. The album, which followed on the resurgence of critical acclaim for Dylan's work after Planet Waves, was greeted enthusiastically by fans and critics.

In the years following its release it has come to be regarded as one of his best albums; it is quite common for subsequent records to be labeled his "best since Blood on the Tracks." It is also commonly seen as a standard for confessional singer-songwriter albums; though Dylan has denied that the songs are autobiographical, his son Jakob Dylan has stated: "The songs are my parents talking." Most of the lyrics on the album revolve around heartache, anger, and loneliness. In 2003, the album was ranked number 16 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album reached #1 on the Billboard 200 charts and #4 on the UK Albums Chart. The single "Tangled Up in Blue" peaked at #31 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The album remains one of Dylan's all-time best-selling studio releases, with a double-platinum US certification by Read more on Wikipedia Number TWO - Blonde on Blonde - in 61 charts Blonde on Blonde is American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's seventh studio album, released in May or June 1966 on Columbia Records and produced by Bob Johnston.

Recording sessions commenced in New York in October 1965, with numerous backing musicians, including members of Dylan's live backing band, The Hawks. They continued until January 1966, but yielded only one track that made it onto the final album—"One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)". At Johnston's suggestion, Dylan, accompanied by keyboard player Al Kooper and guitarist Robbie Robertson, moved to the CBS studios in Nashville, Tennessee. These sessions, augmented by some of Nashville's top session musicians, were more fruitful, and in February and March all the remaining songs for the album were recorded. The album completed the trilogy of rock albums that Dylan recorded in 1965 and 1966, commencing with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Blonde on Blonde is often ranked by critics as one of the greatest albums of all time. Combining the expertise of Nashville session musicians with a modernist literary sensibility, the album's songs have been described as operating on a grand scale musically, while Read more on Wikipedia Number THREE - Highway 61 Revisited - in 41 charts Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.

It was released in August 1965 by Columbia Records. On his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan devoted Side One of the album to songs accompanied by an electric rock band, and Side Two to solo acoustic numbers. For Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan used rock backing on every track, except for the closing 11-minute acoustic song, "Desolation Row". Critics have written that Dylan's ability to combine driving, complex, blues-based rock music with the power of poetry made Highway 61 Revisited one of the most influential albums ever recorded. Leading off with his hit single of that summer, "Like a Rolling Stone", the album features many songs that have been acclaimed as classics and that Dylan has continued to perform live over his long career, including "Highway 61 Revisited", "Ballad of a Thin Man", and "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues". Dylan named the album after one of the great North American arteries, which connected his birthplace in Minnesota to southern cities famed for their musical heritage, including St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.

Highway 61 Revisited peaked at number three in the United Read more on Wikipedia Number FOUR - Bringing It All Back Home - in 23 charts Bringing It All Back Home is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's fifth studio album, released in March 1965 by Columbia Records. The album is divided into an electric and an acoustic side. On side one of the original LP, Dylan is backed by an electric rock and roll band - a move that further alienated him from some of his former peers in the folk song community. Likewise, on the acoustic second side of the album, he distanced himself from the protest songs with which he had become closely identified (such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall"), as his lyrics continued their trend towards the abstract and personal. The album reached #6 on Billboard's Pop Albums chart, the first of Dylan's LPs to break into the US top 10. It also topped the UK charts later that Spring. The lead-off track, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", became Dylan's first single to chart in the US, peaking at #39.

Dylan spent much of the summer of 1964 in Woodstock, a small town in upstate New York. Dylan was already familiar with the area, but his visits were becoming longer and more frequent. Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, also had a place in Woodstock, and when Joan Baez went to see Dylan that Number FIVE - Desire - in 14 charts Desire is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's 17th studio album, released by Columbia Records in January 1976. It is one of Dylan's most collaborative efforts, featuring the same caravan of musicians as the acclaimed Rolling Thunder Revue tours the previous year (later documented on The Bootleg Series Vol. 5); many of the songs also featured backing vocals by Emmylou Harris. Most of the album was co-written by Jacques Levy, and is composed of lengthy story-songs, two of which quickly generated controversy: the over-11-minute long "Joey", which is seen as glorifying the violent gangster "Crazy Joey" Gallo, and "Hurricane", the opening track that tells a passionate account of the murder case against boxer Rubin Carter, whom the song asserts was framed.

Carter was released in 1985, after a judge overturned his conviction on appeal. A well-received follow-up to Blood on the Tracks, Desire reached #1 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart for five weeks, becoming one of Dylan's top-selling studio albums (currently certified double platinum), while reaching #3 in the UK. It claimed the number one slot on NME Album of the Year. Rolling Stone named Desire #174 on its list of The 500 Greatest Albums Read more on Wikipedia Number SIX - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - in 7 charts The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 by Columbia Records. Whereas his debut album Bob Dylan had contained only two original songs, Freewheelin' initiated the process of writing contemporary words to traditional melodies. Eleven of the thirteen songs on the album are original compositions by Dylan. The album kicks off with "Blowin' in the Wind", which would become one of the anthems of the 1960s, and an international hit for folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary soon after the release of Freewheelin'.

The album featured several other songs which came to be regarded as amongst Dylan's best compositions and classics of the 1960s folk scene: "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right". Dylan's lyrics embraced stories ripped from the headlines about civil rights and he articulated anxieties about the fear of nuclear warfare. Balancing this political material were love songs, sometimes bitter and accusatory, and material that features surreal humor. Freewheelin' showcased Dylan's songwriting talent for the first time, propelling him to national 1. Blood on the Tracks - in 18 US charts 2. 'Blonde on Blonde' & 'Highway 61 Revisited' - both in 15 US charts 4. Bringing it all Back Home - in 11 US charts 5. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - in 4 US charts 6.

Desire - in 3 US charts 'The UK Dylan 6' 1.'Blood on the Tracks', 'Blonde on Blonde' & 'Highway 61 Revisited' - all 3 in 23 UK Charts 4. Bringing it all Back Home - in 13 UK charts 5. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - in 3 UK charts 6. The Times They Are a-Changin' - in 2 UK charts 'The Dutch Dylan 4' 1.Blonde on Blonde - in 22 Dutch charts 2.Blood on the Tracks - in 12 Dutch charts 3.Desire - in 11 Dutch charts 4.Highway 61 Revisited - in 5 Dutch charts 'The Belgian Dylan 2' 1. Blood on the Tracks - in 13 Belgian charts 2. Blonde on Blonde - in 3 Belgian charts 'The Dylan 6 twenty-one years ago (1993)' 1. Blonde on Blonde – in 10 charts 2. Highway 61 Revisited – in 9 charts 3. Blood on the Tracks – in 8 charts 4.

Bringing it all Back Home – in 6 charts 6. ‘Desire’ & ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ – both in 1 chart Bob Dylan | Biographical Essay from the Kennedy Center Honors | American Masters | PBS Biographical Essay from the Kennedy Center Honors Bob Dylan: No Direction Home Biographical Essay from the Kennedy Center Honors June 28, 2006 Comments In 1997, Bob Dylan was a Kennedy Center Honoree. Below is the text of a speech given by writer and music critic Tom Piazza for that occasion. The central question for an American artist – both as an American and as an artist – is how to remain indivisibly oneself while, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, containing multitudes. Few in our time have done both as fully as Bob Dylan. By now it probably goes without saying that he is the foremost American songwriter of the last 35 years. Even a short list of his best known songs, from “Blowin’ In the Wind” through “Mr.

Tambourine Man” and the songs from classic albums like Highway 61 Revisited, Blood On The Tracks, Infidels and Time Out Of Mind, would take up half this page. In the course of writing and performing them he has changed everyone’s expectations of the kinds of complexity and meaning that popular songs could deliver. But beyond his preeminence as a songwriter and performer, Bob Dylan has remained a quintessentially American artist in the largest sense, a true American original. By combining African-American blues, white country music, rural folk music, imagist poetry and rock and roll, Dylan created a new musical and literary form, both popular and serious at the same time, which many have emulated but of which Bob Dylan is still not only the prototype but the unchallenged master. From the beginning, Dylan’s work has occupied a special, central ground where forms and genres that had previously been seen as separate or incompatible combined and were transmuted into something both wholly his own and wholly in the American grain.

From many sources came one voice – E pluribus unum – and in his constant reimagining of these materials he has proved, over and over, that the elements of American culture, in all their contradictory, painful, exhilarating and sometimes indigestible glory, are infinitely elastic, and infinitely renewable. For years, reviewers of popular culture have reflexively referred to Bob Dylan as the voice, even the conscience of a generation. And it is true that the period of the 1960s, in nearly all of its aspects – its political and moral preoccupations, its apocalyptic overtones – was reflected in his recordings of the time as it was in no other single artist’s work, regardless of genre. Yet he has remained an abiding presence in American culture, his work growing and changing as he and the culture at large have grown and changed during the past three decades. He and his work represent something perennial in our culture.

“I always thought,” he said once, “that one man, the lone balladeer with the guitar, could blow an entire army off the stage if he knew what he was doing.” That sense of the power of the lone creative voice can be traced, its pulse felt, through the great river of creative imagery and action that stretches back centuries in the United States: traveling lecturers, tall-tale spinners, itinerant entertainers of all sorts, blues singers, old-time fiddlers. It is there to be heard in the work of Jimmie Rodgers and Blind Lemon Jefferson, Emily Dickinson and Bessie Smith, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, the sense of the individual voice, intensely personal, indivisible, taking on American life, in all its epic contradictions. In his song “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” on his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, the singer spins a long, tall yarn in which he arrives in North America before the arrival of Columbus and has a series of funny, dreamlike encounters, skirmishes, and near-misses with a gallery of bizarre characters.

At the end of the song the singer greets Christopher Columbus himself as the explorer arrives on the continent, and Dylan wishes him a deadpan “good luck.” It is a tall tale in a tradition going back to Mark Twain, and well before him, yet it is something more as well. In it we watch a vivid imagination cutting a mythic reality down to size – projecting itself, in fact, right into the middle of that reality. With wry humor, the singer celebrates a discovery of a land that is confusing and out of whack yet full of possibility, and claims, in a more than symbolic sense, the territory for his own. There is a recognizable stance here, and in all of Dylan’s work: a sense that the individual sensibility – aesthetic, political, spiritual – could claim a role at the heart of the nation’s ongoing drama, in the middle of its ethnic and regional polyphony, locate what was of value there, and sing a new self, even a new country, out of it. As if the very activity of incorporating, coming to terms with, those multitudes of influence and utterance is itself somehow at the heart of the American ideal.

A large part of Dylan’s enduring claim on our imagination and attention is that his example has restated that ambition and that possibility, year after year, to this day. His has been an example not only to songwriters but to fiction writers, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers, constant proof that this culture, in all its contradictions, is still there to be claimed yet again, seen anew, through the agency of the human heart and imagination.

Question: 'Highway 61 Revisited' and 'Blood On The Tracks' were both albums released by which popular singer?
Answer: BOB DYLAN